OS have to be on C:?

Hammer100 · 12 Apr 2011 at 14:02

Hi All

Need a bit of help. Friends PC would not boot up and he kept getting Corrupt System 32 so we chucked in the Windows disc and did a repair which seemed to go ok. After though we noticed that the drive where the OS is installed is has been given the 'I' drive letter. He cant remember if this was like that prior to the corruption. He only has one hard drive which is split into 2 partitions. I thought that the OS had to have the 'C' drive letter?
This is the current layout of Drives and Devices:

Local Disk (I) - Win XP installed here
Local Disc (J)
Removable Disk (C) - part of his internal card reader
DVD-RAM Drive (D)
Removable Disk (E) - part of his internal card reader
Removable Disk (F) - part of his internal card reader
DVD/CD-RW Drive Drive (G)
Removable Disk (C) - part of his internal card reader

Since the repair job he has had one BSOD which happened 24 hours after the repair but nothing since

Appreicate any advice on this drive letter thing

Engram · 12 Apr 2011 at 14:24

In my experience - it doesn't have to be C, but a lot of things don't work properly when it's not C. (There's a lot of software that assumes that Windows is on C).

I recommend doing whatever it takes to get it back to C.

Hammer100 · 12 Apr 2011 at 14:29

Cheers mate, might have to go down the reinstall route now. Bit of a bugger but probably best to sort it out.

matt100 · 12 Apr 2011 at 14:36

can't you just go into disk manager in device management and shuffle the letters around to move the removable disk to something like Z or whatever then change the boot partition to C? Assigning drive letters is pretty easy.

True_Scotsman · 12 Apr 2011 at 14:38

matt100 said:
can't you just go into disk manager in device management and shuffle the letters around to move the removable disk to something like Z or whatever then change the boot partition to C? Assigning drive letters is pretty easy.

This is what i was thinking would be something to try out first.

Hammer100 · 12 Apr 2011 at 14:48

Yeah thought about that and did a google but a couple of places said that you cant change the letter of the drive where the OS is installed too.

bledd · 12 Apr 2011 at 14:54

When installing Windows, remove the cables for the card reader and all other hard drives

Hammer100 · 12 Apr 2011 at 15:13

cheers bledd. will make sure of that one

bulldog147 · 12 Apr 2011 at 16:49

I cannot see why is A: and B: is a waste of drive unused (as these designed for out of dated floppy disk drive only)